Many recent papers have studied the development of superforecaster-level event forecasting LLMs. While methodological problems with early studies cast doubt on the use of LLMs for event forecasting, recent studies with improved evaluation methods have shown that state-of-the-art LLMs are gradually reaching superforecaster-level performance, and reinforcement learning has also been reported to improve future forecasting. Additionally, the unprecedented success of recent reasoning models and Deep Research-style models suggests that technology capable of greatly improving forecasting performance has been developed. Therefore, based on these positive recent trends, we argue that the time is ripe for research on large-scale training of superforecaster-level event forecasting LLMs. We discuss two key research directions: training methods and data acquisition. For training, we first introduce three difficulties of LLM-based event forecasting training: noisiness-sparsity, knowledge cut-off, and simple reward structure problems. Then, we present related ideas to mitigate these problems: hypothetical event Bayesian networks, utilizing poorly-recalled and counterfactual events, and auxiliary reward signals. For data, we propose aggressive use of market, public, and crawling datasets to enable large-scale training and evaluation. Finally, we explain how these technical advances could enable AI to provide predictive intelligence to society in broader areas. This position paper presents promising specific paths and considerations for getting closer to superforecaster-level AI technology, aiming to call for researchers' interest in these directions.

We study an emerging and intriguing problem of multimodal temporal event forecasting with large language models. Compared to using text or graph modalities, the investigation of utilizing images for temporal event forecasting has not been fully explored, especially in the era of large language models (LLMs). To bridge this gap, we are particularly interested in two key questions of: 1) why images will help in temporal event forecasting, and 2) how to integrate images into the LLM-based forecasting framework. To answer these research questions, we propose to identify two essential functions that images play in the scenario of temporal event forecasting, i.e., highlighting and complementary. Then, we develop a novel framework, named MM-Forecast. It employs an Image Function Identification module to recognize these functions as verbal descriptions using multimodal large language models (MLLMs), and subsequently incorporates these function descriptions into LLM-based forecasting models. To evaluate our approach, we construct a new multimodal dataset, MidEast-TE-mm, by extending an existing event dataset MidEast-TE-mini with images. Empirical studies demonstrate that our MM-Forecast can correctly identify the image functions, and further more, incorporating these verbal function descriptions significantly improves the forecasting performance. The dataset, code, and prompts are available at https://github.com/LuminosityX/MM-Forecast.

Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated great potential in various data mining tasks, such as knowledge question answering, mathematical reasoning, and commonsense reasoning. However, the reasoning capability of LLMs on temporal event forecasting has been under-explored. To systematically investigate their abilities in temporal event forecasting, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of LLM-based methods for temporal event forecasting. Due to the lack of a high-quality dataset that involves both graph and textual data, we first construct a benchmark dataset, named MidEast-TE-mini. Based on this dataset, we design a series of baseline methods, characterized by various input formats and retrieval augmented generation(RAG) modules. From extensive experiments, we find that directly integrating raw texts into the input of LLMs does not enhance zero-shot extrapolation performance. In contrast, incorporating raw texts in specific complex events and fine-tuning LLMs significantly improves performance. Moreover, enhanced with retrieval modules, LLM can effectively capture temporal relational patterns hidden in historical events. Meanwhile, issues such as popularity bias and the long-tail problem still persist in LLMs, particularly in the RAG-based method. These findings not only deepen our understanding of LLM-based event forecasting methods but also highlight several promising research directions.We consider that this comprehensive evaluation, along with the identified research opportunities, will significantly contribute to future research on temporal event forecasting through LLMs.

The advent of Transformers marked a significant breakthrough in sequence modelling, providing a highly performant architecture capable of leveraging GPU parallelism. However, Transformers are computationally expensive at inference time, limiting their applications, particularly in low-resource settings (e.g., mobile and embedded devices). Addressing this, we (1) begin by showing that attention can be viewed as a special Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) with the ability to compute its \textit{many-to-one} RNN output efficiently. We then (2) show that popular attention-based models such as Transformers can be viewed as RNN variants. However, unlike traditional RNNs (e.g., LSTMs), these models cannot be updated efficiently with new tokens, an important property in sequence modelling. Tackling this, we (3) introduce a new efficient method of computing attention's \textit{many-to-many} RNN output based on the parallel prefix scan algorithm. Building on the new attention formulation, we (4) introduce \textbf{Aaren}, an attention-based module that can not only (i) be trained in parallel (like Transformers) but also (ii) be updated efficiently with new tokens, requiring only constant memory for inferences (like traditional RNNs). Empirically, we show Aarens achieve comparable performance to Transformers on $38$ datasets spread across four popular sequential problem settings: reinforcement learning, event forecasting, time series classification, and time series forecasting tasks while being more time and memory-efficient.

Modeling the dynamics of interacting entities using an evolving graph is an essential problem in fields such as financial networks and e-commerce. Traditional approaches focus primarily on pairwise interactions, limiting their ability to capture the complexity of real-world interactions involving multiple entities and their intricate relationship structures. This work addresses the problem of forecasting higher-order interaction events in multi-relational recursive hypergraphs. This is done using a dynamic graph representation learning framework that can capture complex relationships involving multiple entities. The proposed model, \textit{Relational Recursive Hyperedge Temporal Point Process} (RRHyperTPP) uses an encoder that learns a dynamic node representation based on the historical interaction patterns and then a hyperedge link prediction based decoder to model the event's occurrence. These learned representations are then used for downstream tasks involving forecasting the type and time of interactions. The main challenge in learning from hyperedge events is that the number of possible hyperedges grows exponentially with the number of nodes in the network. This will make the computation of negative log-likelihood of the temporal point process expensive, as the calculation of survival function requires a summation over all possible hyperedges. In our work, we use noise contrastive estimation to learn the parameters of our model, and we have experimentally shown that our models perform better than previous state-of-the-art methods for interaction forecasting.

Temporal event forecasting aims to predict what will happen next given the observed events in history. Previous formulations of temporal event are unstructured, atomic, or lacking full temporal information, thus largely restricting the representation quality and forecasting ability of temporal events. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel formulation for Structured, Complex, and Time-complete Temporal Event (SCTc-TE). Based on this new formulation, we develop a simple and fully automated pipeline for constructing such SCTc-TEs from a large amount of news articles. Furthermore, we propose a novel model that leverages both Local and Global contexts for SCTc-TE forecasting, named LoGo. To evaluate our model, we construct two large-scale datasets named MidEast-TE and GDELT-TE. Extensive evaluations demonstrate the advantages of our datasets in multiple aspects, while experimental results justify the effectiveness of our forecasting model LoGo. We release the code and dataset via https://github.com/yecchen/GDELT-ComplexEvent.

Machine-based prediction of real-world events is garnering attention due to its potential for informed decision-making. Whereas traditional forecasting predominantly hinges on structured data like time-series, recent breakthroughs in language models enable predictions using unstructured text. In particular, (Zou et al., 2022) unveils AutoCast, a new benchmark that employs news articles for answering forecasting queries. Nevertheless, existing methods still trail behind human performance. The cornerstone of accurate forecasting, we argue, lies in identifying a concise, yet rich subset of news snippets from a vast corpus. With this motivation, we introduce AutoCast++, a zero-shot ranking-based context retrieval system, tailored to sift through expansive news document collections for event forecasting. Our approach first re-ranks articles based on zero-shot question-passage relevance, honing in on semantically pertinent news. Following this, the chosen articles are subjected to zero-shot summarization to attain succinct context. Leveraging a pre-trained language model, we conduct both the relevance evaluation and article summarization without needing domain-specific training. Notably, recent articles can sometimes be at odds with preceding ones due to new facts or unanticipated incidents, leading to fluctuating temporal dynamics. To tackle this, our re-ranking mechanism gives preference to more recent articles, and we further regularize the multi-passage representation learning to align with human forecaster responses made on different dates. Empirical results underscore marked improvements across multiple metrics, improving the performance for multiple-choice questions (MCQ) by 48% and true/false (TF) questions by up to 8%.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques continue to broaden across governmental and public sectors, such as power and energy - which serve as critical infrastructures for most societal operations. However, due to the requirements of reliability, accountability, and explainability, it is risky to directly apply AI-based methods to power systems because society cannot afford cascading failures and large-scale blackouts, which easily cost billions of dollars. To meet society requirements, this paper proposes a methodology to develop, deploy, and evaluate AI systems in the energy sector by: (1) understanding the power system measurements with physics, (2) designing AI algorithms to forecast the need, (3) developing robust and accountable AI methods, and (4) creating reliable measures to evaluate the performance of the AI model. The goal is to provide a high level of confidence to energy utility users. For illustration purposes, the paper uses power system event forecasting (PEF) as an example, which carefully analyzes synchrophasor patterns measured by the Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs). Such a physical understanding leads to a data-driven framework that reduces the dimensionality with physics and forecasts the event with high credibility. Specifically, for dimensionality reduction, machine learning arranges physical information from different dimensions, resulting inefficient information extraction. For event forecasting, the supervised learning model fuses the results of different models to increase the confidence. Finally, comprehensive experiments demonstrate the high accuracy, efficiency, and reliability as compared to other state-of-the-art machine learning methods.

Events are occurrences in specific locations, time, and semantics that nontrivially impact either our society or the nature, such as civil unrest, system failures, and epidemics. It is highly desirable to be able to anticipate the occurrence of such events in advance in order to reduce the potential social upheaval and damage caused. Event prediction, which has traditionally been prohibitively challenging, is now becoming a viable option in the big data era and is thus experiencing rapid growth. There is a large amount of existing work that focuses on addressing the challenges involved, including heterogeneous multi-faceted outputs, complex dependencies, and streaming data feeds. Most existing event prediction methods were initially designed to deal with specific application domains, though the techniques and evaluation procedures utilized are usually generalizable across different domains. However, it is imperative yet difficult to cross-reference the techniques across different domains, given the absence of a comprehensive literature survey for event prediction. This paper aims to provide a systematic and comprehensive survey of the technologies, applications, and evaluations of event prediction in the big data era. First, systematic categorization and summary of existing techniques are presented, which facilitate domain experts' searches for suitable techniques and help model developers consolidate their research at the frontiers. Then, comprehensive categorization and summary of major application domains are provided. Evaluation metrics and procedures are summarized and standardized to unify the understanding of model performance among stakeholders, model developers, and domain experts in various application domains. Finally, open problems and future directions for this promising and important domain are elucidated and discussed.

Current clinical practice for monitoring patients' health follows either regular or heuristic-based lab test (e.g. blood test) scheduling. Such practice not only gives rise to redundant measurements accruing cost, but may even cause unnecessary patient discomfort. From the computational perspective, heuristic-based test scheduling might lead to reduced accuracy of clinical forecasting models. A data-driven measurement scheduling is likely to lead to both more accurate predictions and less measurement costs. We address the scheduling problem using deep reinforcement learning (RL) and propose a general and scalable framework to achieve high predictive gain and low measurement cost, by scheduling fewer, but strategically timed tests. Using simulations we show that our policy outperforms heuristic-based measurement scheduling with higher predictive gain and lower cost. We then learn a scheduling policy for mortality forecasting in the real-world clinical dataset (MIMIC3). Our policy decreases the total number of measurements by 31% without reducing the predictive performance, or improves 3 times more predictive gain with the same number of measurements using off-policy policy evaluation.